Hugo Blanco

September 10, 2011 -- Green Left Weekly -- Economist, activist and writer Derek Wall (pictured above) is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales (and the Green Left grouping within it) and is the author of several books on ecology and politics. Wall will speak via video link at the Climate Change Social Change activist conference in Melbourne,r September 30 to October 3. He maintains the ecosocialist blog Another Green World. He spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Simon Butler about the politics of ecosocialism.

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What are the most valuable insights ecosocialists can bring to discussions about the source of our ecological problems?

Ecosocialism, without being reductionist, cuts to the roots of the
ecological crisis. The destruction of the environment is not an
accident. It is not simply a problem of false ideas and it is not a
product of inappropriate policies that can easily be dealt with by
electing a new set of politicians.

September 16, 2010 -- via Socialist Resistance -- Hugo Blanco, a longstanding leader of Peruvian peasant struggles and
fighter for Indigenous people's rights is touring Britain as a guest of
Socialist Resistance and Green Left [an ecosocialist group within the Green Party of England and Wales].

On September 11, 2010, Blanco spoke at the successful Green Left/Socialist
Resistance fringe meeting at the Green Party conference. Blanco started by
criticising "biblical Marxism" -- adhering to Marxist works as if they were
holy scripture. He talks about his long personal struggle for social
justice and against oppression. In a comment at a
meeting at the Venezuelan consulate in London, he explained that we need
to put an end to capitalism before it puts an end to us.

The concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere
is already so high that the climate system has been brought out of balance. The
CO2 concentration and global temperatures have increased more rapidly in the
last 50 years than ever before on Earth, and will rise even faster in the
coming decades. This adds to a multitude of other serious ecological
imbalances, the impacts of which threaten the lives and livelihoods of the
people of the world, most acutely, impoverished people and other vulnerable
groups.

October 13, 2009 -- Socialist Voice -- Peruvian peasant leader Hugo Blanco, who edits the newspaper La Lucha Indigena,
was interviewed on August 28, 2009, in Arequipa, in southern Peru. The
previous day he gave a presentation at a conference entitled “40 Años
de la Reforma Agraria” at the city’s Universidad Nacional de San
Agustín.

You said last night that today the Indigenous peoples of the
Amazon are in the vanguard of the struggle in Peru. Can you say more
about this?

“The
Self-organised Legislative Coup of the FTA [Free Trade Agreement], Indigenous
Peoples and Social Movements” was the name of the national gathering of originario [indigenous] peoples, peasant
communities and social movements that took place in Lima. There Mariátegui
magazine interviewed Hugo Blanco, who in the 1970s led land takeovers in La Convención, Cusco, before the agrarian reform of Juan
Velasco Alvarado was implemented. Today he continues in political combat from
the trenches together with the peasantry, and as director of the newspaper Lucha Indigena (Indigenous Struggle).

Cuzco, Peru, October, 3 2008 -- First,
I would like to express my profound gratitude to all of the people and
institutions who, upon hearing of my arrest, demanded my liberation.* Every one of those was important. But among those that touched me most,
I should mention the pronouncement made by my Canadian brothers and
sisters with whose support I am able to continue publishing Lucha Indígena the call from the Conacami
(The Peruvian National Confederation of Communities Affected by Mines)
with whom I share the anxious desire for a political project that
emanates from the indigenous, campesino and grassroots
organisations; and the support of Wilbert Rozas, the mayor who
instituted the indigenous communities’ municipal government and went
immediately to Paruro after learning of my arrest. Thanks to this
solidarity, I was quickly—though temporarily—released.

Hugo Blanco was leader of the Quechua peasant uprising in the
Cuzco region of Peru in the early 1960s. He was captured by the
military and sentenced to 25 years in El Fronton Island prison for
his activities, but an international defence campaign won his
freedom. He continues to play an active role in Peru's Indigenous,
campesino, and environmental movements, and writes on Peruvian,
indigenous and Latin American issues.

He wrote this article for Socialist Voice on the eve of the
sweeping victory of the Country Alliance Movement (Movimiento
Alianza Pai­s) and President Rafael Correa's anti-imperialist
government in the September 30 elections for Ecuador's new
Constituent Assembly.

Mercopress reported October 2 that "Ecuadorian president
Rafael Correa received a landslide support in the Sunday election
for a Constitutional Assembly which will be tasked with reforming
the country's constitution and leading it towards what he has
defined as XXI Century Socialism." Alianza Pais will end up with
somewhere between 76 and 80 seats of the Assembly's 130 members,
enabling Correa "to work, in alliance with smaller groups with a
comfortable majority."